Independent

In case I've never written this on my blog, I was homeschooled from kindergarten through 12th grade. I have no idea who I'd be if I had gone to school, but certainly the 18 years before I began college have shaped me in ways which I am still discovering. Some of those are good, and some of them are less so.

I arrived at college with very little experience in building lasting friendships. Sure, there were people who I'd eaten meals with and shared rooms with at summer camp, and there were people I chatted with and took selfies with in youth symphony, but my only real friend was my 16-year-old sister, and we had just been separated. I'd "dated," and the boys hadn't known much more about relationships than I had. Add to this the experience of having to go to different buildings for different classes, the horror stories everyone told me about Chicago winters, and the assumption from other students that I knew what I was doing.

Freshman year, I tried to do things with people. It was hard. In the fall, I bought two tickets each to three Lyric Opera performances, and a different person went with me each time. My sex life was similar: lots of short-lived flings that I was barely invested in but that made me feel like someone wanted me around. (Ultimately I grew away from that and into a mentality where someone wanting me more than I wanted them paralyzed me.) Sophomore year, I stopped trying. I was living half an hour away from campus, and I had my own room; it was really easy to hide myself away from social interaction, although this and other factors led to my roommates asking me to leave midway through my junior year.

Alone, I wasn't particularly happy, although Netflix and Facebook meme groups provided an escape from the depressive dullness of my reality. A vicious cycle emerged where I retreated into the online world I had curated for myself because I didn't believe that people in my Chicago life liked me enough to spend time with me, and those people (I assume) saw me as antisocial and figured I didn't want to be invited to spend time with them.

A month after I turned 21, I was living in a studio apartment closer to campus. This gave me freedom to invite people over totally on my terms; in addition, it felt easier to decide at 8pm on a Friday to go to the bar half a block from the school of music. Loosed from the partly self-imposed and partly outward pressure to do things with my former roommates, I began trying to make friends again. Now that I was closer to their age, grad students no longer seemed as intimidating, and it was plausible to me that they might enjoy my company.

The idea of a group of friends who does everything together has always been alien to me. I'm much more likely to tag myself onto the corner or the end of a group who all know each other far better than they know me and vice versa, so even with a healthier social life, I still end up traveling to and from events alone, as opposed to some of my friends who always arrive in twos or threes.

What is the point of this post? what am I trying to say? I'm not sure.